Many years ago, I conducted an experiment of placing a note in copies
of several briskly selling books in a local Washington bookstore. The
notes had my phone number and offered $5 to anyone who saw them and
called me up. No one called. Though hardly scientific, this tended to
confirm my suspicion that people like buying books more than they like
reading them. And of course, in the famous formulation (credited to
Gloria Steinem, among others), writers don't like writing—they like
having written. They like having written under the impression that this
means they will be read. The whole book thing is thus based on mutual
misunderstanding.
--Michael Kinsley (1951-) in Slate, 21 November 2002
